What is it about the Sunday night closing slot on the main stage at Voodoo Fest? It is usually not the best-attended show, but in recent years, it has hosted some of the best performances of the festival. Wilco and My Morning Jacket, to name two, have destroyed in that slot. This year, it was the Raconteurs' turn.

Matthew Hinton / The Times-PicayuneBrendan Benson, left, and Jack White of the Raconteurs close out the main stage at the Voodoo Fest on Sunday, Oct. 30, 2011.

They are led by Jack White, who was cast as the representative of the contemporary class of guitar heroes alongside the more senior Jimmy Page and The Edge in the documentary “It Might Get Loud.” Yet in some respects, the Raconteurs are a throwback.

Guitar heroes in general are in sort supply these days, White being a notable exception. Singer/ guitarist Brendan Benson could have passed for a 1970s rock star, given his voice, crushed velvet jacket and vest, vaguely psychedelic shirt, loose tie and shoulder-length mop of blonde curls. White’s guitar solos, of which there were several, sometimes channeled the blues-rock assault of the late great Duane Allman. Bassist Jack Lawrence looks and plays like someone in Iron Butterfly.

White stated his case definitively in “Blue Veins,” a slow, heavy blues grinder. At one point, the song melted away to just a glimmer of feedback. But the Raconteurs roared back and White stepped up to carve a solo. He peppered it with a flurry of scarlet notes, clean and deep like cuts from a sharp, new knife. It was a statement of a solo.

This was not, however, the exclusive Jack White Show. He shared vocal duties with Benson -- a more conventional rock vocalist -- and frequently switched to acoustic guitar, leaving it to Benson to carry the load on electric. An organ filled in the space around the guitars in “Rich Kid Blues.”

Benson and the rest of the band flashed plenty of brawn. White and Benson opened “Steady As She Goes” by squaring off for a polite guitar dialogue. The song concluded with the duo facing drummer Patrick Keeler as he hunched over his barebones kit, raining down body blows.

For the final “Carolina Drama,” Benson contributed electric slide guitar as White returned to acoustic. I would have liked to see and hear White take another run up the mountain on an electric. But he had already taken listeners there at least once more than most bands.